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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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My first day as a software developer

I was broke and looked pretty disheveled when I got my first dev job and when I showed up on my first day somebody called security on me while I was waiting in the lobby 😐

Everybody has to start somewhere!

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panditapan profile image
Pandita

I was nervous and my "tocayo" (we have the same name!) was the one onboarding me. He showed me over 15 different programs he used to code, he sorta explained git to me (I had never heard of it at the time), then sublime, then PHP, Laravel and so on. Later that morning I was thrown in a project with no docs, no comments, no nothing! I was so ashamed of asking questions but my lead was really nice about it. Then in the afternoon, I was told about another project I would be in at the same time I was working on the other one.

It was so. much. for. me.

But I had lots of fun at that job. I really miss it sometimes.

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manuelojeda profile image
Manuel Ojeda

Suerte que entraste directo a Laravel, que genial 🤟

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enmel profile image
Enmanuel Marval

Solo vine a decir que: Laravel es lo máximo

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sandeepbalachandran profile image
Sandeep Balachandran

After college I realised i got no 'food' remains from parents. So I got into a startup and when I showed up on my first day there was no one even security so i waited in the lobby until they arrived. Soon I realised it was the wrong building

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Adam Crockett 🌀

About 6 months into my career 🐣 I got a project working for the local government council, I designed thier intranet to look like the Xbox 360 dashboard sort of (let's employ a youth, with no experience to design our internal tooling), they still use it and too this day! I haven't had complaints. It even had useless features like customizable wallpapers. I cringe 🤦‍♂️

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achimoraites profile image
Achilles Moraites

On my first Dev job I was told that I will be working for free as long as i did not produce enough revenue for the company and I should be thankful to be trained for 'free'.

After a month of working hard both in the office and at home the company made me a proposal to hire me as a NodeJS Developer.

The beginning has hard and even I thought I had the basics covered the challenges just blew my mind!

Don't let the fear of failure to stop you from doing what you love, if you don't try you fail for sure!

If you try you can succeed!!!

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maxart2501 profile image
Massimo Artizzu • Edited

Shame that made you swallow that bs about being "productive for the company"!

Companies are expected to invest in new talents. A little loss is expected and acceptable.

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achimoraites profile image
Achilles Moraites

I agree that the companies should invest in people!

It's sad how many talents are being lost because they don't get the support they deserve!

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Gift Egwuenu • Edited

I was working for exposure literally. I took the job because I was eager to learn from experienced engineers. But I worked for free for two months and left couldn’t afford to keep up.

I just summarized my first months...

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maxart2501 profile image
Massimo Artizzu

A pity they didn't even offer you a wage 🙁

If you're actively contributing on any way, you should get paid.

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lukegarrigan profile image
Luke Garrigan

I was excited, couldn't wait for them to see how good I was at programming, how much University had taught me. Oh, how wrong I was 🤣. It took me a good 5 minutes to realise that I know literally nothing.

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Bhaumin Shah

I started my first day of my first DEV job going to staples with my boss to pick my computer desk and chair, and then assembling them all by myself. This was pre Ikea days, circa 2004, so it wasn't as easy but it was very satisfying in the end.

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Oliver Obenland

I was so proud of myself, because I were so fast with typing the signature of a java main method, when I started Vocational orientation for pupils as software developer. Well, I never wrote it once, nor writing code at all in this time but was cleaning the warehouse and sorting hardware 🤣

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Iamsbharti

At first I was excited about my first job , every bit was memorable and it had to be since a lot of efforts was put to reach at that point, and then the veil lifted when i was asked to create a custom logic to generate reports of tasks run in production by quering the db and display the results along with proving users capabilities to filter out. The room temperature was icy but i was sweating ,it took 2 days but i finished it.Happy starting .I was ready for next challenge.

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Gerardo Alcantara

I was hire for Motion graphics, and they say in some cases I will throw some html and css in the project.

now I'm the Lead front-end developer of our own templeate engine.
No more 3d graphics in Cinema4d or AE motion graphics for me this days, only code code and more code.

I'm the todologo in the company (front-dev && Motion graphics) 🐒

By the way my job is not that hot at all I build, design and make animated videos for online Courses about Security awarness on the internet, GDPR, HR and other things for the Seniors and not tech people.

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kbono profile image
Jose Manuel Viloria

First "enterprise-level" work I was going to join after several years of freelancing.

I was told "So, yeah. We're Portuguese so we'll have to go to the Technical HQ in Porto, Portugal for a couple days so you get a better grasp about the culture, who you're going to be working with and practice your Portuguese a lil' bit."

First day of work I got to meet my product owner and a colleague.

We got to the office, I was given access to a whole bunch of tools, Agile gibberish and so on, I was asked to pick a "work item" from the board, since I simply didn't get a thing from the whole set of tickets/work items we had for picking i went for something that seemed complex so I could get a look at the code and mostly to be given enough time to come up with a solution.

The thing ended up being rather simple and the ticket I thought was the easiest was extremely complex to solve, that much that I needed guidance from some of the seniors from the group.

I failed miserably to speak in Portuguese, so there's that. Did "great" at the work part, socializing wasn't my strongest point those 3 days.

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kbono profile image
Jose Manuel Viloria

Also, my hotel reservation went bananas and I was thrown from one corner of Porto to the other, twice in a single night, the hassle was that much that my previous boss had to come over and help me solve the issue.

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Dave Martinez

I was super nervous. My first dev job was a full-remote work. My first day was meeting the team on the standup meeting through Google hangouts. I did not know what to expect and my idea of a developer was they know all stuff around developing stuff so I was very nervous and imposter syndrome was kicking in when they start talking about stuff that I have no idea about.

They gave me time to learn for a week and I tried talking with my colleagues and they made me comfortable with not knowing a lot of stuff. So yeah, it was an adjustment period and a really fast one.

Goodluck to everyone starting out!

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Waylon Walker

I can relate with being broke on day one. My first day was after having 1 month off between college and work, which was spent on our roadtrip honeymoon. It was amazing, but due to some car trouble among other things it went way over budget. Getting to that first paycheck was tough.

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Manuel Ojeda

I was confused, seeing everybody knowing their role. My boss were explaining to me was we were to use: PHP5 as Backend and jQuery in the Frontend alongside with Bootstrap.

I was scared of screwing something, even that I was doing the ; mistake (forgot to use a ; at the end of a php line)

If I can say something to my younger self: Dude don't be scare, learn from anything and never stop learning and inproving yourself.

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Swarup Kumar Mahapatra • Edited

Before i was software developer, i was software tester. I was asked to copy paste each line of the BRD (Business Requirement Document) into an Excel sheet. And add Sl No. to each row.

Must say , there was nothing to learn , than excel formulas and macros